Our little underwear ad makes the news...

Thanksgiving 2012

I woke up this morning in a Holiday Inn in Houston, Texas. I just found if you say any line with [city], Texas, it could be a song. Anyway, I woke up this morning in Houston, Texas, and there is a song somewhere. It's coming through the crack under the door of the dark hotel room. In the bit of light from the air conditioned wind billowing the curtains away from their station, I see Sarah barely on the edge of her bed. Otto is sleeping on the other side and Quin has wiggled perpendicular to them, his feet pushing against his mom, his head against his brother. The three are in a precarious field goal "H" shape. Sarah gives me a little wave. I think it's less to greet me and more to say "Don't even think I'm sleeping." It's something that I deserve, having slept in a bed to myself. Something that five years ago would have made me sad and alone, has become rich capital amongst tired parents. I stretched out and took up the whole space, shoving the extra pillows to the floor and pummeling the one I kept into a brutal hug. The rest of me sprawled at a most inefficient angle across the space that Sarah would have killed to have.

Now she's on her side, clinching her eyes to keep the inevitable morning away as long as possible. Her boys careen through their sleep, in the way kids live every moment, storming ahead like shopping spree winners, they even slumber aggressively, but restfully. It is "the moment" that they unwittingly understand--live it to the fullest even if your unconscious. I've had trouble with that. It beats you up on both ends, day and night. When you don't fully take advantage the day, you end up thinking about it when everyone else is asleep.

I popped up from a dream where I was chasing a criminal before giving up to go to my Grandma Coleen's house. This is due, in part, to a text from my Aunt Leslie, who simply said, "Remember--Thanksgiving 1997." And I do, right now with tears, of my own family together, and my dad actually coming out of the mountains to see his brother and sister, mother and stepfather. Hey, seeing people opens up all kinds of things you may not want to think about, but the payoff is that it'll give you more good than bad. It'll grow something new to shade you from that old, tired grudge. In 1997 we had an oasis. My dad was there. My brother was in from the the Navy and my mom was very much alive after her first two tumor surgeries. I can see her now, with her daughter who was still in the bliss of her first year out of high school, and me, newly unemployed but too young and irresponsible to realize that's not a good thing.

That song I heard from the hotel room had a classical guitar solo that whirled up from the harmonies of an electronic echo and a chorus I couldn't quite understand. But as I sat on the edge of my selfish bed, it's distant strumming took me around the room in 1997. In that faraway place I knelt to talk to my Grandpa Lyle in his wheelchair. We didn't know how soon it was before he'd die. His famous mischievous smile didn't say much about it.

In 1997 there was comfort everywhere. Leslie and Stuart's big home outside of Boulder was a warm spot on a cold November planet. I can hear my mom talking to someone and she sounds positive; we'd go to her mom's house the next morning. Grandpa Mac was slipping into Alzheimer's, so visits were different, as we didn't know how to help a woman who had never ever needed it.

For now, though, there was food. And laughter and solace in the eye of the indeterminable. My Grandma Coleen whisking around making sure everyone was warm and/or well fed, and my uncle bellowing the levity and innocence of a tiny pinhole into the past. The light I thought it shed was actually from a sunless Texas morning. It's the dawn of a reality with so many people passed, and an older guy who is now genuinely scared of not having a job.

I lean over Sarah and put my hand on her arm. I do that a lot to make sure she's alive. The years have given me reason to worry about those kind of things. She waves. The curtain billows and there are the boys. Otto hasn't moved since he finally passed out from a day of travel and play that had him conscious much longer than he's used to. Quin takes swath of bed much bigger than a 32-pound five year old needs. I'm happy he can do that.

The light under the door is a quick escape to a place where I can write. The hotel's pleasant lobby soundtrack isn't ideal, but it's friendly. So I find this big overstuffed chair in a corner and try to shake the sadness of a 1997 gone. And I find it's looking forward as fondly as I am looking back.